The present invention is generally directed to Online and browser-based publishing of documents, books, and other personal works.
Many consumers have entertained the idea of publishing personal works for limited use and distribution. There are many compelling reasons for doing this. Some personal works, for example, are directed to honoring a cherished family member or memorializing a personal history. Publishing a creative story, novel or portfolio can also be quite rewarding. Small businesses and educators have also found published books to be an excellent way to promote their own products and ideas to a target audience.
Although the industry has made valiant attempts at meeting this increased demand for individualized publishing, there are still many obstacles that prevent the individual consumer and small entity from publishing their own works. In fact, the complexities and costs associated with publishing can be quite prohibitive.
In the past, it was relatively expensive to professionally publish individual and small quantities of a work because professional publishing required the assistance of the large presses which are associated with high overhead and are not nimble enough to print only a few books at an affordable price. Recent developments in the printing technologies and machinery, however, have enabled professional printing from small operations, and such that it is now possible to obtain professional printing for even small quantity print jobs at relatively affordable price point.
Although there are now many businesses set up to help the consumer publish their own personal works, it can still be difficult for the consumer to find and engage these businesses. For at least this reason, many publishing companies have started to provide Online or browser-based publishing services through the Internet.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, many consumers are still discouraged in their attempts to publish their personal works because they have found the publishing process to be too complex and cumbersome. In particular, the process of laying out the text and graphics to be printed in an appropriate format can be very tedious and difficult. Although software publishing interfaces and other such tools are designed to help the consumer, they are often inadequate and too slow.
One problem with existing software interfaces is that they are unable to accurately render a print preview of the work to be published. For example, existing browsers modify the size, positioning and fonts of the text and images that are generated by the publishing applications in order to facilitate the browser-based rendering operations according to predefined rules of the browser. One reason for this is that some browsers may not have the appropriate font files for recognizing and rendering the original text in their native fonts.
Because the typesetting and font information received from a rich publishing application is not necessarily compatible with a client's standard browser, the client may not be able to see an accurate representation of their personal work while it is being worked on and viewed through their Internet browser. This can be very particularly frustrating when the consumer receives a published work that is different than the product they thought they created in the Online publishing service, and simply because the browser failed to provide an accurate representation of their work.
To compensate for the inadequacies mentioned above, many Online publishing services compile the client's submissions into a PDF or other image-type file, for review, which accurately reflects the actual fonts and formatting of the work. This file cannot be edited by the client for modifying the work, as it is only an image file, but it can be accessed by the client to see what their finished product will look like when it is printed.
If the client wants to make additional changes they will then need to go back to the browser-based window of the publishing application to make the changes that are anticipated to generate a desired result. However, the client cannot know what the ultimate consequence of their changes will be until a new PDF preview is generated because their anticipated changes are only made to a modified browser-based version of the actual work.
The publishing service will then re-typeset the work, with any modifications that are submitted, and generate a new corresponding PDF preview to send to the client for additional review. This process is iteratively repeated until the client is happy with the previewed product or until the client gets tired of making changes.
This iterative process of generating previews every time content is submitted or edited can be quite time consuming and is not very user friendly. In particular, the consumer can experience a relatively long delay between the time they make a change and the time it takes to get a new preview back. This latency is particularly noticeable when the work includes a lot of content that all has to be compiled each time a new preview is generated. Large files can also take a relatively long time to transmit and load.
This undesirable delay in obtaining a preview is particularly noticeable and frustrating when the client has only made relatively minor changes to their personal work, such as, for example, to a single page. Although the client expects that relatively minor changes will result in the receipt of a new preview in a shorter time than it would take to receive a new preview following significant changes, this is not necessarily true. In particular, the time it takes for the publishing service to re-typeset, compile and send a new preview to the client can actually take about the same amount of time, irrespective of whether the most recent changes were minor or significant. This is particularly true when considering that a significant percentage of the latency experienced by the consumer is the time it takes for the publishing service to resend the entire preview to the client, including all of the images in the work, even though the client had already received the images previously. If there are numerous images, the time it takes to transmit and load the compiled document for preview can be quite lengthy.
Even when the preview document sent to a user only includes one or two pages, the existing publishing applications still compile all of the color images along with the text to generate the preview file. This unnecessarily wastes processing and transmission resources during the iterative editing process. This is particularly true when considering that the client has already received the color images in a previous transmission.
Other problems experienced with Online publishing includes the difficulty in relocating sections of a work. Although some services provide interfaces for identifying and displaying sections of a work in an index or table of contents, existing systems do not provide an easy way to move the sections of content around. For example, when a client wants to move one section of content to another location, existing systems only let the client relocate one page of content at a time.
Currently, there are no services available in Online publishing for moving multiple pages in a work at one time and through manipulation of the corresponding table of contents. Accordingly, if a client determines that one or more entire sections need to be moved to different chapters or other locations in a work, the client is faced with the onerous and daunting task of having to move each page individually and to reformat the entire document. Such an endeavor is particularly daunting in view of the fact that the client is unaware of what the result of the changes will be to each change without first requesting for and loading a preview of the entire work, as previously discussed.
Existing systems are also somewhat limited in their flexibility for moving even a single page at a time. For example, a page cannot be relocated from one section to another section, by leap-frogging multiple intermediary pages, in a single operation. Instead, the page has to be repeatedly selected and moved past each intermediary page through a plurality of separate operations.
In view of the foregoing, there is clearly a need in the industry for improved Online publishing methods, interfaces and other publishing tools to improve the user convenience for individual and limited publication of personal works.